NBC News Blows Redirect From MSNBC.com

16 years ago I participated in something called “Project Ohio” – the partnership between NBC and Microsoft to create the awesomely named MSNBC. Today NBC is buying full control of MSNBC from Microsoft and is changing MSNBC.com to NBCNews.com – only they forgot to tell the SEO guy.

Go to www.msnbc.com and you get 301 redirected to www.msnbc.msn.com – all good – and then you get 302 redirected to www.nbcnews.com. Oops!

So now when you go to Google and search “nbc news” you get this:

Looks like a rush job to me. Curious if their organic is tanking tonight?

MAKE IT GO VIRAL WITH YOUR AWESOME SHARING POWERS:

4 responses so far ↓

I dont know a lot about seo and I dont want to sound like a dummy but I am a newbie….. what should it have propperly been for it to have been done right and how should they do it so that they dont loose organic ranking and keep all their seo juice from the msnbc site?

Don’t worry about sounding like dummy isela. The stupidest question is the one you didn’t ask and all that. The issue is that 302 redirects are not effective at passing PageRank, so right now all of the juice is flowing from msnbc.com to msn.com and not to nbcnews.com. They should be using a 301 redirect from msnbc.msn.com to nbcnews.com. This kind of technical SEO issue could kill the site’s rankings. That said, I think this was a total rush job as you can see that the article links on nbcnews.com still link to msnbc.msn.com.

Not sure what the rush was to get this out, instead of waiting until a complete transition was done, but such is life in the media/tech deals.

I noticed that too. As of this morning all of their social profiles were also still linking to MSNBC. There was definitely no unified rollout here. Smells to me like an IT guy somewhere got overexcited or like maybe the breakup wasn’t all that amicable.

Although I have no inside info, I can pretty much guarantee (based on my own experience at NBC), that this had nothing to do with the IT guy. My best guess is that the deal was done and either a) the deal guys either never really considered the technical migration plan or they didn’t think it was an important issue, or b) the deal got leaked so they rushed out a press release to control the messaging and the IT guys got a “please redirect the home page” text message about an hour before the announcement came out.